Still winter!

This is Cheltenham Gold Cup week, and true to form it has snowed, as it so often does.  Not much - a few showers early in the week, which left the fields all dusted white and some stuff blowing around on the road, but nothing disruptive (the south-east and near Continent had heavy snowfalls, though).  The weekend was indeed dry, but bitterly cold, with a biting easterly wind - three-pairs-of-gloves gardening weather, and even then I had to keep coming in to warm my fingers up.  There have been some very hard frosts at night, and not always a thaw during the day.  It has since warmed up a fraction, although the pond is still frozen over; rain is forecast for tomorrow, but it may be brighter at the weekend.

Despite the cold, I got a few odd jobs done in the garden.  While the pond didn't need filling at all last year, I did rather neglect it and hadn't cleared any of the weed from it.  Lots got pulled out at the weekend.  I was expecting to see some wildlife in there, but nothing came out - no dragonfly nymphs, newts or even water snails.  Maybe the weed had deterred them?  I'm surprised about the snails, though; there has always been a good population of them.  They help keep the water clear, so I may have to get some more.  I also started clearing weeds in the veg patch in preparation for spring sowing. There's still no sign of the garlic and onions, so I bought some more garlic and planted it; it needs cold weather to make the cloves split, so I hope it's not too late.  I doubt if this week's cold weather will have any effect on newly planted cloves; I imagine they need to be actively growing for the splitting to happen.

Interesting how plants flop in extreme cold and bounce back afterwards.  The snowdrops went really limp but have perked up again; the bergenia too.  The bergenia is in flower, and the first of the brunnera (the 'Jack Frost' seedling by the gate) is also coming out; I also found a few flowers on the violets down the bottom of the garden, where they're shivering in the teeth of the easterlies.  They didn't flower last year, seeming to put their energies into spreading around. The 'Blue Pearl' crocuses are coming out, and the first daffodils will be ready for cutting this weekend; they're not out yet, but they're at the stage where they should open in a vase indoors.  They're always late here; it's rare for us to have any for St David's day!

There are some seedlings sprouting in the cold frame.  I'm afraid I've done it again: sown something without labelling it.  It's obviously something I was sure I would recognise when it came up, but at the moment I can't tell what it is!  There aren't many seeds that would germinate in the cold frame in this weather and at this time of year, and it's something sown a pinch of seeds at a time rather than singly, so I'm guessing it may be parsley.  There again, it could be rocket.  Time will tell, I suppose.

The tamer birds have been coming regularly for food, and others hanging around in the background.  At one point we had three robins at once, with a bit of a territory-scrap.  The song thrush is still about, and a wren; and in the snow the other day we had six partridges huddling miserably under the potentilla.  The pheasant is about quite a bit, and seems to have a favourite roost on top of the Leylandii hedge.  It looks a bit exposed to me, but he appears to like it.